The Rumble Murders

When George Palmerston Gaynleigh (“the ‘Palmerston’ was silent, in so far as George could preserve silence on that painful infliction”), author and “spasmodic” detective novelist (you will of course recall his two excellent published mysteries, The Sheaghan Shillelah and The Murder at the Microphone), arrives in the wealthy and seemingly contented suburban development of Randall Green as a guest of his friend Ed Marsh, he little suspects that he will soon be embroiled in a crime problem more intricate than anything he ever dared put down on paper. It seems that someone in the area has picked up a nasty habit of shooting men and then stashing their stripped bodies in the rumble seats of local cars—most emphatically not a practice calculated to heighten property values! Soon George joins a neighborhood “homicide squad” —comprised of himself, Ed, a journalist and, wonder of wonders, an actual detective—which tries, with help from Ed’s winsome wife, Jeanie, to crack a fiendishly complex murder case. Will the squad solve the baffling mystery of the bodies in the rumbles?

The Rumble Murders was first published in 1932, as by Mason Deal, the pseudonym for Henry Ware Eliot, Jr. (older brother of famed poet and mystery-lover T. S. Eliot). This new edition includes a bibliographic introduction by detective fiction historian Curtis Evans and an afterword on T. S. Eliot's mystery fiction interest by David Chinitz.